DR. A. W. VERRALL.
THE death of Dr. Verrall (which took place on Tuesday) removes from Cambridge society one of its most striking figures. In his own University his influence was obviously very great, but to estimate the importance of his work to the world at large is a more difficult matter.
Verrall was born in 1851 and went up to Trinity in 1869. He was bracketed with Mr. T. E. Page as second classic in 1873, the year in which Henry Butcher was senior classic. He then became in succession fellow, lecturer, and tutor of his college, and was finally appointed last year to the newly created King Edward VII. Chair of English Literature. It would be easy, judging from this brief list of the outward facts of his life, to write him down without more ado as "a great scholar " ; but no description of him could he more false. Verrall was something less, but be was also something more, than a great scholar. His studies on Euripides—the works by which he is best known—exhibit a mind which is the very antithesis of what used to he expected from a student of the classics. And if to-day our ideas upon the right way of appreciating Greek and Latin literature are altering, it was undeniably Verrall's influence and example which hastened the change. We are all of us familiar with the old-fashioned method of reading a Greek tragedy, the blinding attention to details, the cold repression of emotion, and, worst of all, the superficial and conventional aesthetic approba- tion which brought the whole dreadful post-mortem to a close. Such a process was intolerable to a mind like Verrall's. He threw it over completely, and was, perhaps, the first critic for generations who remembered that the classical authors were human beings, and who considered it legitimate to exercise an independent judgment upon the merits of their writings. The case of Euripides gave him his great oppor- tunity. The scholars had long considered Euripides' plays unsatisfactory ; but by riveting their attention upon details they were able to hush the fact up, and continued in a mechanical way to acclaim him as the equal of Aschylus and Sophocles. Verrall's first business was to tear aside the veil, and to show that, if the scholars' view of such a play as Ion was correct, honest opinion must pronounce its author hopelessly stupid and incompetent. This, however, led to a dilemma, for such excellent judges as Aristotle had a very different opinion of Euripides. It is well known how in " Euripides the Rationalist" and his two later books on the same subject Verrall proposed a solution for this dilemma. Whether it is the correct one is a highly controversial question ; but it may be asserted with some confidence that the correct solution will be found upon Verrall's lines. In any case the dilemma itself remains and can no longer be shirked ; and it was this power of forcing a clear-cut intellectual problem upon those who would always prefer not to face one that was the great merit of his mind. Its inherent disadvantages were displayed when he came to apply himself to the plays of Aschylus. He was apt to allow purely intellectual considerations to run away with him, and, a rationalist himself, he sometimes forgot that human motives are not always rational. But, in spite of this weakness and in spite of doubts which have sometimes been cast upon the " soundness " of his scholarship in the narrower sense, there can be no question of the importance of Verrall's influence in freeing English classical study from the bonds of a brain- less conventionality.
His interests, however, had a wider field than Latin and Greek. He was devoted to French as well as to English literature; and his own writings, with their purity of style and clearness of exposition, are proofs of his power in the use of his own language. As a lecturer he was incomparable. There are many who will remember all their lives his lecture upon the Birds of Aristophanes at the time of the perform- ance of the play in Cambridge some ten years back. He had an astonishing gift of creating a thrilling intellectual interest ; and even his routine lectures for the Classical Tripes used to arouse the sleepy undergraduates to paroxysms of enthusiastic excitement. In this he was greatly assisted, no doubt, by his voice, which was peculiar in timbre, and which he used with unerring effect. To hear him read aloud— whether it was an ode of Horace, or a chorus from a Greek play, or a song from Shelley—was an experience as startling as it was satisfactory. His friends will think of him, too, as a brilliant conversationalist, with an almost inhuman gift for dramatic anecdote. Most of all, however, they will admire the extraordinary courage with which he faced the last years of his life. Though his body was crippled by a painful illness his mind seemed never for a moment subdued by it. It was always active and at times irrepressibly gay, as willing to discuss The Mystery of the Yellow Boons as a Pindaric ode, ready to break out into a snatch of song from the Mikado or a tirade from Aucbromaque. The value and nobility of a free-ranging intellect is the lesson which Verrall has left behind him in his life no less than in his books.
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